


aethermakers

by satellites (brella)



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: F/M, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-06
Updated: 2013-12-06
Packaged: 2018-01-03 14:55:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1071773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/satellites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It does not matter, he thinks, if he is going to Hell. Perhaps, being here, being beaten, being blinded, being deprived of her—perhaps he has been there already.</p>
            </blockquote>





	aethermakers

**Author's Note:**

> Companion piece to [waterbearers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/877776) (Casey/Hunter) and [firekeepers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/837198) (Jade/Ike). A birthday present for my dearest and most treasured friend, Macey.  
>  _Aether_ was perpetuated by Aristotle in his work _Timaeus_ as the "fifth element," the quintessence of all that made up fire, earth, air, and water. Aether, he said, was what the stars were made out of; unlike the other four elements, it was not tangible and therefore not corruptible or able to be blemished. Aether was what Heaven was made of.

 

 

 

  
_He who learns must suffer;_  
_and even in our sleep_  
_pain that cannot forget_  
_falls drop by drop upon the heart,_  
_and in our own despair,_  
_against our will,_  
_comes wisdom_  
_by the awful grace of God._

— Aeschlyus

 

 

* * *

 

 

Fortunato can still smell the sweat on his clothes when he hobbles off of the airplane.

He does not know why his walk is so unsteady, nor why his eyes will not stop stinging. He had slept for the entire flight, whatever its duration, and he had done so soundly, no matter how he tried to fight it.

As soon as his feet sink into the unfamiliar sand, as soon as the flaming wind begins to feel as though it is carving cracks into his skin, he clasps his trembling hands together and closes his eyes and prays.

He does not know what he is praying for, anymore. “Fortunato, if ever you are afraid, only pray. Pray, and God will answer you, and you will have nothing to fear,” his father had told him. “You were brought to us an angel, my son. You must learn how to act like one.”

“Fortunato?” the man called Abraham ventures from behind him, and Fortunato digs his fingers tighter against each other. “Open your eyes. Look around you.”

“I don’t want to,” Fortunato, in a flash of petulance, retorts. He knows that as soon as he looks upon whatever is in front of him, as soon as he unravels his begging hands and agrees not to be blind, then all of this will become real, and permanent, and inescapable, and he will never go home again.

A hand comes to rest on his shoulder. It is heavy and far too steady.

“I understand why you’re frightened,” Abraham murmurs. “But what’s done is done. You of all people, Fortunato—you must understand that now is the time to have faith in the fact that this is the way it must be. The way it was fated.”

Fortunato has heard all of the tales about the Lord’s plans and the Lord’s will, and he is hardly straying from his devotion to them, but he supposes that he had never imagined that the Lord’s will would be this. He had always been taught that the Lord, in all His glory and kindness, would look out for him.

He repents for hours, the next day, for the fleeting thought that he has: That faith is not enough, sometimes.

He swallows the lump in his throat and wills his eyelids to part, and he shields his face against the rumbling sand in the air with one thin arm. The sun overhead is a blazing white and there is nothing on the horizon, no hills or mountains, no villagetops. There are only tents.

“Welcome home, Fortunato,” Abraham says, and lifts his hand away.

Fortunato does not cry anymore.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The winter is bitter and violent and chews its way between her bones, hardening her childhood-tendered skin by the time she is walking. She carries a stick taller than she is and swings it around when she trudges around the woods with Snizhynka; she wishes, sometimes, that her mother would care enough to scold her not to wander too far or too late.

“How many more days till summer?” she asks Snizhynka, who only blinks back at her with blue eyes and a glistening black nose. She smiles softly and scratches him behind the ear, which makes his tail wave so enthusiastically that it knocks a pile of snow from a low-hanging branch. “I do not know, either. Not long, I hope.”

The lake is not frozen in the summer, and so she hikes down to it with bare feet and dives naked into it, laughing when Snizhynka paddles clumsily in after her. She does not remember what her mother’s face had looked like without the eyepatch just as she does not remember what wildflowers grow on the riverbank in the spring; every day is winter, and every day is ice, and every day is another man come up from the village at her mother’s behest that she must gut like the squirrels she brings home for dinner.

Her stomach rumbles between her small ribs. She dreams of roasted hams and sugar plums and apples from the highest trees, and when she wakes up, she can smell it all so clearly, though she knows nothing of warmth.

“I love you, Mama,” she murmurs sleepily one January night as a blizzard howls outside and her mother absentmindedly strokes her short black hair in front of the fireplace. Snizhynka lifts his furry head from his paws and gazes at the both of them, curled up on top of a bear pelt rug.

The roving fingers stop and the chest against which Irina is slumped stiffens.

“I’m sorry,” Irina stutters out. “I’m sorry, Mama; I won’t say it again.”

“My clever girl,” Kseniya whispers in that hoarse and throaty voice of hers, and Irina falls asleep. “My foolish daughter.”

There are two men the next morning, instead of one.

 

 

* * *

 

 

"Who are you supposed to be?" the snide and skinny boy in the glasses asks with a pointed sneer, eyes flicking over Fortunato with calculated interest.

Fortunato is uncomfortable. It is his first afternoon in the cafeteria and the noise level is high and the yam mash on his tray looks unappetizing, and he had been trying to find a private corner in which to hunch up and eat as quickly as possible, but had failed. He forgets, sometimes, how  _social_  the other children at this camp are.

"Ian!" the girl beside him hisses, swiftly jabbing a practiced elbow into his ribs and causing him to yelp. She swings her attention back to Fortunato with an ebullient smile that makes him very nervous. "Hi! Hi, hello, hi. I’m Akiko. You are the new guy, right? I’m Akiko! How are you liking it here? I mean, probably not that much right now; but that is okay! I remember my first month here; it was super duper horrible – so freaky; um, I’m Akiko."

"You already mentioned that bit," her bespectacled friend mutters, and this time, she whacks him hard upside the head until his glasses are dislodged. "Christ, Akiko, what—"

"And  _this_  grump who I am only friends with because I feel sorry for him,” Akiko says, “is  _Ian_.”

"Cheers," Ian grunts.

"Don’t talk to him," Akiko stage-whispers. "Really, do not bother; it agitates him."

"I’m not agitated!" Ian snaps agitatedly.

"What’s your name?" Akiko asks Fortunato, her grin growing ever-brighter and her cheeks pinker along with it. "I heard Father Abraham say it but it was hard to pronounce."

"If you already know what it is, then why are you asking?" Ian snickers, seeming to relish how harum-scarum her chattering is. He readjusts his glasses and wrinkles his nose up at Fortunato. "Come on, mate; just tell her. Maybe then she’ll quit all this rubbish, yeah?"

"Shut up, Ian," Akiko barks, punching him in the shoulder. Fortunato confesses himself surprised that the boy can take this much constant abuse – his frame is wiry and fragile-looking and looks as though it could shatter if so much as prodded in the proper place.

He hasn’t the faintest idea what either of them has just said to him, only that Akiko is very excited and Ian says things that are worth being assaulted over, so he doubts that they are safe to be around.

Slowly, he backs away, eyes darting furtively down to his tray. He gives them both a curt nod and bites his lip and strides away, half of a scamper, really, and goes to sit at the empty, battered table in the very back corner of the cafeteria tent.

He can hear Ian laughing behind him. “You scared him off! Nice one, Akiko.”

"Shut up, Ian," Akiko retorts, but it’s much sadder this time, and even though Fortunato doesn’t know what it means, he makes sure to face away from them when he sits down. It feels like the polite thing to do after that.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Irina can still smell the soot and the blood on her hands and in the crooks of her elbows when she turns to meet the sound of the voice.

“Who are you?” she demands, in a voice that sounds as coarse as the one that will never again tell her it is time to wake up, will never again tell her to beat the world down with her bare hands.

Snow fills the empty air between them. The woman is tall, and pretty, and several obsidian strands waver out from under her fur hat. Her face is round, but her eyes are firm. Irina does not like her.

“My name is Danielle Clarkson,” the woman says, her clear tone breaking the wind apart with prying hands. She is speaking Ukrainian, but there is something in the way she says her _r_ ’s that is not quite practiced. “I’ve been looking for you for a very long time.”

“Why?” Irina barks, taking a step back.

“I can’t explain that to you right now,” Danielle Clarkson replies. “Not the way you deserve. I know that you’ve been through a lot – I know that you probably don’t trust me. I wouldn’t trust a strange woman telling me to come away with her. I’m only asking that you have faith, Irina. Please, just… trust me. I will not hurt you.”

“Faith,” Irina repeats, cagey. “Dog shit.”

Danielle Clarkson lets out a small chuckle. “I like your spunk. But yes… faith.”

She extends a gloved hand, locking blue eyes with Irina and thinning her lips into a solemn line.

“I can take you away from here,” she promises. “A place where you won’t have to ever be afraid again.”

“I was never afraid,” Irina shouts to the tundra.

She takes Danielle Clarkson’s hand.

“Where will you take me?” she asks.

Danielle Clarkson’s fingers squeeze hers. “The future.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

He does not make any friends at the camp. The other children all think him strange, he knows, by the way their voices plunge to whispers when he walks by; he is the unwilling peer during each afternoon of combat training, preferring to read instead of learn how best to gouge out another human’s eyes with only his thumbs.

“Did you know that the amount of force it takes to crush the human windpipe is the same that it takes to crush a soda can?” Guillaume asks him with his usual smirk, crushing a can of Coca Cola illustratively.

Fortunato only knows Guillaume because Guillaume’s favorite pastime seems to be instilling fear in the hearts of all those with whom he crosses paths, but Fortunato is, truthfully, not afraid.

“You can see everyone for who they are beneath all pretenses and lies,” his father had told him, smiling warmly in the humid summer sun. “Your eyes see what is  _true_ , Fortunato. You see no masks, only what is beneath them. It is what God wished for you to see.”

Fortunato knows that Guillaume loves fiercely and is only frightened of that, and so he tries to bury it with airs of fierce hatred instead. Guillaume had decided that he and Fortunato were comrades, and so he tells Fortunato all sorts of awful things, like how to pull off each leg of the beetles that fly through the camp and then watch them roll frantically without limbs until they die. Fortunato does not like it.

“All of God's creatures…” he had tried to say once, struggling even to articulate himself in his native tongue. “All the… all the creatures of God, all…”

“Nut up, Fortunato,” Guillaume had retorted with a wicked smile. “We are the gods now.”

 _Sarcilégio_.

Seeming to bring balance to Guillaume’s sadistic mischief is Vanessa, a gentle girl who seems to grow the fastest out of all of them and perpetually seems an older sister. Father Abraham had assigned her to give Fortunato his first tour of the camp upon his arrival, and she had picked up quickly on the fact that Fortunato had spoken no English and so had tried her best to convey things to him with only her hands, and they were nice hands, hands meant to hug and to hold, despite how proficient they are at wielding a sparring staff. 

Fortunato likes Vanessa. She shares her clementine oranges with him and never asks him any questions. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Fortunato is in the library tent when Father Abraham brings the girl in.

He stares. His Bible hangs, unread, between his hands. He has been at the camp for three years and he has smiled little and he has never  _stared_  at anything; Fortunato Medeiros does not  _gaze_.

She must be at least half a head taller than he, even though she looks to be the same age. Her hair is jet black and sleek and frames her face in a tightly-cropped bob that makes all of her pale features sharper. Her nose is thin, and so is her frame, but she is outlined in muscle that shows clearly through her t-shirt and cargo pants. He physically cannot take his eyes from the curve of her neck, from the red skin on her elbows, as though she has stolen them right out of his skull.

She is so much skin, so much snow. The desert cowers and loses its incendiary glory beneath her feet, and when she turns her head and rivets her steely blue gaze onto him, he jumps, bringing his Bible straight up in front of his face as if to hide from her.

“Who is that?” she asks harshly. Fortunato grips his Bible more tightly.

“Fortunato,” Father Abraham answers, and Fortunato, at the mention of his name, peers surreptitiously over the top of the book to see Father Abraham hunkered down to the strange girl’s level, his elbows resting on one raised knee. “He is a very special boy. He is shy, but he is good at heart. But he does not speak your language.”

“I don't think that he likes me very much,” the girl says, sounding aloof. “He is strange. What is he reading?”

“The Bible,” Father Abraham replies. Fortunato recognizes that, he thinks. “Would you like me to introduce you?”

After a moment’s pause, the girl decisively snips, “No,” and then, to Fortunato’s horror, he hears her footsteps approaching his small desk. He hunches further toward the Bible, his cheeks feeling warm, though he doesn’t know why.

His vision is fractured by the appearance of a single, pale hand directly in front of his face. He leaps back, palms flattening on the wood, and darts his eyes up to meet those of the girl, who is staring down at him unreadably, her arm extended stiffly toward him.

“My name is Irina,” she says to him in perfect Portuguese.

Fortunato merely stares back at her, his caged heart rattling.

“The devil speaks in many tongues, Fortunato,” his father had told him, and then, breaking into a rollicking chortle, had clapped his small shoulder and added, “But none so deceptive as the tongue of love!”

 _Amor_. The word uncurls in Fortunato’s head unprompted as the girl brandishes her hand with increasing insistence at him, glowering. Eventually, left with few other options, he cautiously clasps it, and her expression immediately softens into a proud smile.

“I will protect you,” she declares. Her grip is firm.

Fortunato blinks quizzically, tilting his head. “But... why?”

She shrugs, but does not withdraw. She had not shaken his hand, merely held onto it.

“Because I want to,” she explains crisply. “Because it seems right.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Fortunato is reading from the Book of Samuel when the two hands suddenly clap over his eyes. He yelps, flinging the tome out of his lap with the jerkiness of his reflex.

“Guess who!” a voice giggles.

Fortunato fidgets. His English is better, now, after five years, but still not so good.

“I… do not know,” he mumbles back, closed eyelids twitching, and he inhales through his nose and smells sand and briefly wonders what this would be like, never seeing a thing again, and behind him, Akiko laughs and laughs and laughs.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Father Abraham brings a boy named Hisao to the camp one day and tells them all that he is their new brother now, and to treat him as family. Fortunato keeps his distance, but Guillaume does not waste a second in beginning to exact torment more vehement than he has used on anyone before. 

"He only does that because he likes him," Irina declares with brisk conviction one afternoon, after coming to sit down next to Fortunato on the sparring mat after her turn boxing with Guillaume is finished and Hisao steps up to take her place. "He told me so. I had to twist his arm behind his back, but he told me so." She smiles proudly. "He trusts me, you see." 

"Ah," Fortunato says, not looking up from his lap. His ears feel warm as though Irina’s prideful voice had injected the summer into their drums. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

He prays many times throughout the years, for the fatalistic thudding that happens in the caverns of his typically composed chest whenever he walks in on Irina stretching before combat training, or whenever she crashes down her tray opposite him in the cafeteria tent and sits messily, not saying a word to him or looking at him but stuffing her face with flavorless food and glancing periodically at whatever he’s reading.

She has a dimple in her right cheek when she smiles. Only Guillaume has ever made her truly do it.

“Your eyelashes,” she whispers once, in the dark, a bonfire he had built for them licking orange onto the skin of her face and fingers as she reaches hazily for his temple. She scoots closer in the night sand, running a thumb over his eyebrow. “They are very thick. Very beautiful.”

“Th-Thank you?” Fortunato squeaks back, and he loses sleep that night because of all of his repenting.

“Will you just fucking get a grip?” Ian, his bunkmate now, hisses. “Yeah, Fortunato, you got a stiffy; it happens to all of us. Bloody praying, every fucking night…”

Ian has such a foul mouth. It makes Fortunato uncomfortable. But he likes Ian. He likes it when Ian laughs. He likes seeing Ian and Akiko hold hands without paying attention to what they’re doing, as though that is what made them each stop crying when they were pulled into the blinding white world in infancy, as though that is what puts them to sleep at night.

And Irina always picks him to be her partner in combat training, and she always wins and straddles him and tosses her ponytail back and says, “Good boy, Fortunato; knowing when to call this the quits.”

“It’s just quits, Irina,” Ian calls from the sidelines, never able to resist correcting her.

Irina scowls. “Thank you, Ian.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“What have they done to you?”

Her voice is all he hears. With it comes winter winds and summer sands, the blazing white sun overhead, the perfect rusting blue of the evening sky. He is curled up in the corner, his spine bent against the wall, quivering. He twitches violently away when a hand grazes his shoulder, and he prays, quietly, under his breath, so they will not hear, so they will not whip him again.

“Fortunato,” Irina whimpers, and she is not even trying to hide her tears. Fortunato’s whole body goes still at the sound of her crying. “My God _…_ I will kill them all… Your eyes…”

Shakily, weakly, Fortunato lifts a hand off of the dirt floor and extends it as far as it will go until it grazes hair. He moves it to the left, then, and the pads of his fingers find a jawline, and it is damp; he rests the very tips of his fingers on Irina’s cheek, wondering what it had been like to shed tears; he no longer knows how.

“I-Irina,” he croaks, instead of the title he should be using. “Is that you?”

Her hands close around his and gently hold it and bring it to her forehead, and she lets out a wretched scream, strangled and wrathful and quavering.

“Yes,” she sobs out. “Yes. It is me. I am so sorry, Fortunato; I am too late…”

“No.” Fortunato shakes his head, though it only exacerbates the reddish pain twinging through his every pore. “No, it is never too late, sister… it is never…”

The lips meet his out of nowhere. They are soft and taste of salt and they contort into a sorrowful shape, but they are there, and all he knows how to do, all he can  _think_  to do, now that he knows he will never again see Irina’s face, is curl his fingers between her palms and allow his whole body to slacken.

She had done this before, when they were children, the day before they had been sent to this place. She had grabbed the collar of his shirt behind one of the tents and taken his mouth for her own, framing his face with both hands and scrunching her eyes shut very tightly, and he had prayed in repentance for the entire bus ride afterwards, everything inside of him scampering up and down from his heels to his forehead. 

It does not matter, he thinks, if he is going to Hell. Perhaps, being here, being beaten, being blinded, being deprived of her—perhaps he has been there already.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 _Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears._ — Corinthians 2:13

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Stop shaking,” she whispers, with tears in her eyes.

Fortunato fumbles a hand over and tangles his fingers with her knotted, shaking ones.

“Fools,” the Headmaster roars.

“What does it mean?” he asks her in a hush.

She grips his hand so tightly, with such brutal relief, that it hurts.

“May lightning strike you down,” she answers. “Do not let go of my hand, Fortunato. Never. Never…”

Fortunato does not let go.


End file.
